Zitkála-Šá was born on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota in 1876. When she was 8, she left her Dakota community to attend a Quaker missionary-run boarding school in Indiana. She also attended Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana, and…

The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to assimilate Native Americans by, among other things, transforming their traditional uses and attitudes about land and land ownership to more mainstream American values of private ownership and settled farming. Some…

Federal bureaucrats devised several methods to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American values and culture. One strategy involved trying to change Native Americans' traditional sense of communally held land to a belief in individually…